by Anne Mather
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he said suddenly, his hands on the wheels of his chair bringing him closer to her. ‘You’re wondering how Sandra’s handbag comes to be in our attic, aren’t you?’
Emma moved her shoulders. ‘And if I am?’
‘The explanation should be obvious.’
‘Should it?’ Emma was experiencing an increasing sense of unreality. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Oh, come on…’ David stared at her. ‘Can’t you guess? Think of the night of the accident. I’m sure it will occur to you.’
Emma’s lips parted. ‘She—she was with you!’
‘Full marks. Yes, Sandra was with me.’ His lips curled. ‘For the last time, as you’ve so prudently pointed out.’
‘She—wasn’t hurt?’
‘Bruised, perhaps. No more.’ David’s mouth thinned. ‘Rough justice, wouldn’t you say.’
‘But—she left you!’
‘Yes, she left me.’ David nodded. ‘At my request, of course. Unfortunately, she left her handbag behind.’
Emma felt sick. ‘But you were badly injured!’
‘Oh, spare me the sentimentality!’ David swung his chair about. ‘You wouldn’t understand. You’d never understand, never in a million years! People are human, Emma. They have human failings.’ He glanced at her over his shoulder. ‘Sandra was a real woman, not just a poor imitation!’
Emma flinched. ‘Then why did you marry me?’
David uttered a short laugh. ‘Why do you think?’ He shook his head. ‘I’m not denying that I wanted you, Emma. I always did. Ever since—ever since…Well, never mind. Accept that I did want you, and just because I learned I was never going to walk again was no reason to call it off. On the contrary, I needed you then, more than ever.’
Emma felt cold. ‘But Sandra—’
‘—was a stop-gap, nothing more. Do you think I’d have married her? Hell, no! I wouldn’t marry a woman like Sandra Hopkins.’
‘But you said—she’d got married…’
‘I expect she did. I only said I wouldn’t marry her.’
Emma expelled her breath on a long sigh. ‘That still doesn’t explain how the—the bag got into the attic’
‘Oh, that.’ David was offhand. ‘As soon as I realised Sandra had left her handbag behind, I stuffed it into my briefcase. Then later, after I got home from hospital, I wrapped it in an old sweater, put it in a box, and got the window cleaner to throw it up into the attic. I intended to deal with it later, but I guess I forgot. Besides, no one ever went up there. Until now.’
Emma shook her head. ‘I—I can hardly believe it…’
David swung round again. ‘Then don’t. Forget it—I have. It’s all in the past now. It has no bearing on the present.’
‘You can’t be serious!’ Emma was aghast.
‘What do you mean?’ David looked suspicious. ‘You can’t seriously expect me to believe that this means anything to you now. Good lord, Emma, don’t pretend our association depends on an emotional stability. We both know we’ll never achieve that kind of relationship.’
‘No,’ she agreed tautly. ‘But we could have respect for one another, affection. Unfortunately, right now, I don’t seem to feel anything.’
David scowled. ‘This is just the excuse you needed, is that it? Has that bloody Avery woman been feeding you with the fruits of independence again? Mother said she was a bad influence, but I defended you. Don’t tell me she was right all along.’
‘Oh, David, David…’ Emma turned back to stare out of the window. ‘Stop blaming other people for your own inadequacy. You can’t expect me to learn that you were having an affair with another woman right up to the week of our wedding without feeling something! Some sense of outrage. Can’t you understand that?’
‘Perhaps you should ask yourself why you couldn’t satisfy me yourself!’ he countered harshly. ‘Let me tell you, I would have done you a favour. Virgins! No man enjoys going to bed with a virgin!’
Emma was glad she wasn’t facing him at that moment. A virgin! A hollow description of a hollow defeat. Perhaps he was right—perhaps she was to blame. Perhaps if she had been able to put the memories of Jordan out of her mind, she would have saved him from himself. But if she was honest with herself she would admit that up until the actual hour of her wedding, she had prayed for Jordan to come back to her…
Now she brushed past him, making for the door. ‘I’ve got vegetables to prepare,’ she said, almost inaudibly, but David came after her.
‘What are you going to do?’ he demanded, and she knew he wasn’t referring to the food.
‘I don’t know,’ she replied, not pretending she didn’t understand him. ‘I have to think.’
‘It doesn’t make any difference to us, does it?’ he appealed, and she felt the first reluctant pangs of pity returning. But she didn’t honestly know, and she had to tell him.
‘I have to think,’ she insisted, and left him.
Lunch was a silent meal. Despite his professed anxiety, David ate well, whereas Emma only pushed the fish around her plate. An awful feeling of being trapped was gnawing at her nerves, and she knew that whatever happened, she had to get out of the house this afternoon, away from him. She couldn’t think in his oppressive presence, and the need for some bread was a heaven-sent reason to walk into town. Occasionally, in recent weeks, she had offered to push David’s chair into the High Street, but today she omitted the suggestion and emerged from the house like a prisoner from the cells.
Inevitably, once she was alone, her thoughts turned back to Jordan’s invitation. Here was the opportunity to ring him and tell him she could not go with him without either David or Gilda listening in, but strangely, when she entered the telephone box, her hand hesitated over dialling his number. It was as if she shrank from the step that would make the final break between them, and today, after David’s revelations, she was too raw and vulnerable to suffer his censure.
She wished she could call on her mother, but after Emma’s marriage Mrs Trace had moved away to live with her sister in Cumberland, and apart from Christmas and birthday cards, she made no effort to contact her daughter.
Now, Emma lifted the receiver, listened to the dialling tone, and then, steeling her fingers, dialled the office number. The receptionist who answered said she would find out if Mr Kyle was in the building and asked who was calling. Emma gave her name, and for once was glad it was Ingram. Trace might have meant something to the girl, young as she obviously was, but Ingram meant nothing.
It took ten minutes and two further twopences before Jordan’s voice came on the line, and then she had to fumble for a further twopence before she could talk to him.
‘Where are you phoning from?’ he demanded, and when she explained she was in the telephone box outside Abingford’s general post office, he added wryly: ‘I guess if you’re not phoning from home, the answer must be no.’
‘Well…’ She still avoided saying the word that would cut him off from her for ever. ‘I—I haven’t told David.’
There was a pregnant pause, then he said quietly: ‘So why are you ringing me? Or have you made up your mind without telling him?’
‘I—I—oh, God!’
This as the pips started again, and she realised that if she didn’t put in another coin they would be disconnected.
‘Wait!’ Jordan interrupted her frantic search for a two-penny piece. ‘Stay where you are and I’ll come and meet you. We can’t talk like this.’ And he hung up before she could protest.
Hanging about outside the phone booth, she felt terribly conspicuous. After all, she had lived in Abingford almost all her life. She knew a lot of people, and a lot of people knew her. What if someone saw her and chose to tell David? Then she pushed such anxieties aside. After the way he had behaved, David could hardly protest about her making a perfectly innocent assignation with a man she had known all her twenty-six years.
She was looking about her for a leather-clad
figure when a sleek grey Lamborghini slid to a halt beside the kerb, and Jordan leant across to thrust open the passenger-side door.
‘Get in,’ he invited brusquely, and rather than attract any further attention, she complied.
The car gathered speed quickly, and beyond the traffic lights at the end of the High Street it swiftly left the town’s inner boundaries. She thought at first he was taking her to the factory that was part of the small industrial estate that occupied part of the outer belt of Abingford, and her nerves tingled at the prospect of meeting people she knew, and who had known her father. But instead he turned on to Mallory Road and just as she turned her eyes away from the house where she had spent her childhood, he drove through the gates of Athelmere, the Kyles’ rambling old mansion next door.
Emma’s startled eyes met Jordan’s enigmatic ones as he negotiated the narrow drive, overhung now with unpruned evergreens and the bare branches of the almond trees that always looked so beautiful in the springtime, and in a brusque tone he said:
I thought we could talk here.’
Emma made no response, her attention caught by the building. The house had originally been built in the eighteenth century, but a fire in her great-grandfather’s time had gutted much of the upper floors. The subsequent repairs, carried out later, had smudged the fine Georgian lines, and several extensions had added to its air of mixed ancestry. Neverthless, Emma had always liked it, preferring it to the neo-Gothic monstrosity next door of which her father had been so proud. But perhaps that was because of its occupants, she admitted silently. The Kyles had moved in when she was just a baby, and she had always treated the house as a second home. There was ivy coating the walls, framing the square-paned windows, and adding a warming covering to bare stonework, and her eyes sought the room above the windows of the dining room which had once been Jordan’s.
Now, the Lamborghini slowed to a halt before the panelled door with its familiar fan-shaped window above, and Jordan swung his legs out of the car. Forestalling any attempt he might have made to assist her, Emma climbed out too, brushing down the skirt of her coat as she turned towards him. Today he had shed the leather coat for a three-piece suit of fine brown suede, and his cream shirt and russet tie were immaculate. The complete business executive, she thought, unable to look at him without fear of betraying her bitterness, and with a faint shrug he mounted the short flight of steps to the door ahead of her.
‘Come along,’ he advised. ‘It’s warmer inside. I’ll get Mrs Goven to make you some tea.’
‘But what will your staff think?’ protested Emma, looking up at him then, above her on the steps, and a wry expression crossed his face.
‘What staff?’ His brows arched. ‘You mean the Govens? They are all the staff I retain. I spend so much time—elsewhere, it’s not necessary to employ anyone else. Besides, I prefer not to be waited on hand and foot. My socialist background, I suppose.’
There was irony in his tone and Emma knew what he was meaning. It had always been a bone of contention between her father and his that Andrew Kyle had had only a working-class upbringing, and yet was able to meet Jeremy Trace on equal terms. Indeed, it was soon apparent that Andrew had far the better business brain, whereas her father had been hampered by the indolence of his adolescence. Theirs had been a curious partnership in many ways, but despite their differences they had always remained good friends.
Inside the hall of Athelmere, the efficient central heating system dispelled the chilly afternoon air. But looking about her, Emma could not dispel her own feelings so easily, and there was a lump in her throat as she remembered the last time she had stood here. It was the evening her father had put an end to his life, the most terrible evening she was ever likely to experience.
Nevertheless, she endeavoured not to dwell upon the past and she couldn’t help but notice the air of shabby melancholy that lay over everything like a film of decay. It was as if no one lived here any more, and observing her expression, Jordan said:
‘Like I said, I don’t spend a lot of time here. It has—too many memories.’
‘Does it?’ Emma was surprised. It was not the sort of thing she would have expected Jordan to say, but as if regretting his momentary lapse, he led the way into the library, calling curtly for Mrs Goven.
Across the wood-blocked floor that was badly in need of polishing, the library beckoned like a familiar oasis in a strange desert. In spite of the heating system, someone had lit a fire, and the shadows of the flames danced over leather-bound volumes and worn velvet armchairs. There was Andrew Kyle’s desk, still littered with papers as it had been in the old days, and wasn’t that his corduroy smoking jacket thrown over the window seat in the rounded bay?
Jordan lit the lamp that stood in one corner, and Emma was hovering just inside the doorway when Mrs Goven came bustling up behind her.
‘Oh, Jordan!’ she exclaimed, obviously disconcerted. ‘I didn’t expect you back just yet.’
‘I know you didn’t, Mrs Goven,’ responded her employer, with a wry smile. ‘But Mi—Mrs Ingram and I wanted to have a talk and I thought this was the most suitable place.’
‘Yes, I see.’ Mrs Goven glanced at Emma, and then did a swift double-take. ‘Miss Trace!’ she exclaimed in astonishment. ‘I mean—Mrs Ingram, of course.’ She shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t realise it was you. How are you? And—and your husband?’
Emma smiled, her fingers tightening round the strap of her handbag. ‘I—er—I’m fine, thank you, Mrs Goven. And you? And Mr Goven?’
‘Oh, Charlie’s all right, miss—I mean, Mrs.’ She made an embarrassed gesture. ‘It’s been a long time.’
‘Yes, hasn’t it?’ agreed Jordan dryly. ‘Do you think we could have some tea? Mrs Ingram looks frozen.’
‘Of course, of course.’ Mrs Goven nodded her grey head and hastened out again, bird-like in both looks and movements, and Jordan moved round the desk to close the door and then, to her dismay, stopped right beside Emma.
‘Won’t you take off your coat?’ he asked, making as if to remove it from her shoulders, and she quickly unfastened the leather buttons and shrugged herself out of it.
Jordan took the coat and draped it over the desk, and then indicated an armchair beside the fire. Emma moved towards it jerkily, overwhelmingly aware of his disturbing presence, berating herself for allowing what had happened that morning to shake her normal self-control.
‘So…’ Jordan came to stand before her, not sitting down as she had done, but resting one booted foot on the fireside fender, drawing her attention to the taut muscles of his thighs. ‘You daren’t talk it over with your husband.’
‘I didn’t say that.’ Emma was defensive, and Jordan’s mouth turned down at the corners.
‘No,’ he agreed. ‘But all that nervous prevarication over the phone was not intended as an acceptance, was it?’
Emma bent her head. ‘I don’t know.’
She heard his harsh imprecation. ‘What do you mean?’ he demanded. ‘What don’t you know?’
She shrugged. ‘I don’t know what—what to do.’
‘Emma!’ He sounded exasperated. ‘Either you’re coming or you’re not. That’s all there is to it.
Emma didn’t answer him. It had been that simple once, before the things she had learned about David. Now getting away seemed almost like a lifeline in a wind-torn sea, although she was honest enough to realise that it was not a solution in itself. It had its dangers, too. Jordan might have killed any love she had had for him, but physically he still attracted her, and the line between love and infatuation could become blurred if one moved too close. Yet she was only human, no matter what David might think, and the memories of the relationship she had once had with Jordan still had the power to excite her senses. Was it so unnatural, she asked herself bitterly, when he had been the only man she had ever shared that kind of relationship with?
The return of Mrs Goven with a tray set with teapot, cream jug, sugar basin and cups was a brief divers
ion, and after Jordan’s housekeeper had left them, he suggested that she might help herself.
‘Not for me, thank you,’ he declined, when she asked his preference, and while she sipped her tea, he poured himself a glass of Scotch from the tray set on his father’s desk.
After studying her bent head for a few seconds, he came to take the armchair opposite her, sitting casually on the edge of the seat, legs apart, his hands holding his glass suspended between. It put him more firmly into her gaze and instead of her eyes encountering the crease in the leg of his pants, they rested on the restless brown fingers toying carelessly with the fine crystal.
‘Emma,’ he said at last, ‘you know this is a wasted conversation. You’re not going to throw up your job with Gilda Avery or leave that husband of yours for the better part of a week just to go and see my father.’
‘You don’t know that!’ Emma lifted her head indignantly, and then lowered her lids again as those penetrating dark eyes bored intently into hers. ‘I—I always cared for—for Uncle Andrew—’
‘Don’t call him that!’ Jordan’s voice was abrupt and she was hurt by the harshness of his tone. ‘You’re too old for that kind of foolishness, and making up any relationship that doesn’t exist isn’t going to make the situation any different.’
‘I disagree!’ She forced herself to look at him again, trying to ignore the coldness of his eyes, the disturbing familiarity of the planes of his face. ‘Your father was like a second father to me. That is, until—until—’
‘Until I walked out on you!’ said Jordan callously. ‘Why don’t you say it? It’s true. Or do you secretly harbour some belief that it was all a terrible misunderstanding?’
His words were cruel, but instead of breaking her, they gave her the strength she needed. ‘How could I imagine that?’ she returned sharply. ‘I knew I wasn’t beautiful enough to hold the elusive Jordan Kyle, without the added bonus of Daddy’s shares in Tryle Transmissions!’
